“...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.” — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
Throughout Asia and Europe, pearls were traditionally believed to ease a range of conditions, including eye diseases, fever, insomnia, 'female complaints', dysentery, whooping cough,… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“Ezekiel looked into amber and saw God, but the Teutonic Knights saw something less noble: gold.” — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“…in Pliny’s time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered—as many did until the seventeenth century when this ‘fact’ was still being quoted as a gemological curiosity—how anyone could have thought to experiment with such a thing … He did not realize that the story was probably… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share
“Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently—as the Scottish pearl-fishers, too, had learned to their regret. These creatures are a barometer of how we are treating our planet. Sometimes in our greed to make… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share
Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing.… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence,… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“The probable reason that nobody at Mikimoto wanted a writer to go to the pearl farms of Ago…was because something terrible was happening in… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
